Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner Organization: A major step to deepen engagement with Partners 

In a chat with VARINDIA, Rajiv Sodhi, General Manager, Partner Ecosystem - ‎Microsoft talks at length about the One Commercial Partner organization which has been formed with the intent to serve its partners in a better way - 

Microsoft has recently come up with a unique organization within the company named One Commercial Partner (or OCP) which acts as a single point of contact for its partners. Not only this, the organization aims to work for the betterment of the partners. It makes it easy for the partners to build their products or solutions on the Microsoft platform, and help them in their go to market strategy and selling to customers. 

“In the beginning of our financial year, in July 2017, we created an organization called One Commercial Partner (OCP). In Microsoft there were a lot of teams that used to work with partners. We had 16-17 different teams in different parts of the organization. It was very tough and complex for a partner to work with Microsoft. So what we did was we brought all these together into one organization called OCP. In that way we have one team now that looks after the interests of our channel partners. Our mission is to work with our partners and make everything easy. So this creation of one organization was a very big step that Microsoft took. 

This organization comprises of three very distinct team. The first team is the “Build with” team, which means we partner with these channel partners who are of four types – who build applications on our platform, services projects on Microsoft platform, managed services providers and companies that resell our products. We partner with these channel partners and work on their products and solutions. We make sure that they are technically competent, train the partners, and our architects work with the partners to make sure that their product is built in the right fashion on our platform. 

Second is the “Go to Market with” team; once the product and solution is ready, you need to take that to the market. So what is the offer, the customer segment that you are targeting, the pricing, how do you build the marketing plan to drive customer acquisition – all of these are worked on for our partners by our “Go to Market with” team within OCP. 

Third is “Selling”, where we partner with the Partner’s sales team and take the solution to market. So we actually get into co-selling which means the partner’s sales team and Microsoft’s sales person sell together to the customer. It is the first true form of co-selling anywhere in the industry because Microsoft in this co-selling program retires its sales team’s quota based on the partner solution. When that partner solution is sold to customer, it is on top of our platform and the quota of our sales person gets retired not just on the Microsoft component but on the overall value. 

OCP is a very unique and powerful program. The partner gets the benefit of access to the entire Microsoft network because now the Microsoft sales force is also the partner’s sales force. Another benefit is the single point of contact which actually works with the partner’s team to build their products and solutions. The third benefit is that the partner gets help in going to market,” explains Rajiv Sodhi, General Manager, Partner Ecosystem - Microsoft. 

Cloud v/s On-premise Data Center
These days the cloud movement in India is on a high. People are aware of it and they are gradually shifting to it. But there are also few who are still sceptical about it and in that matter Microsoft’s hybrid cloud model is a major distinguishing feature. 

“At present, in India the movement towards cloud is accelerating. People are aware of Cloud and today the discussion is, in my environment how do I move to cloud.  We meet a lot of customers who want to move 100% to cloud; also there are customers who for the next five years want to move only one workload to cloud. The reason behind this could be many like compliance, budget, maturity, readiness, technology etc, and to such customers we offer the ‘Azure stack’ which is an integrated system of Azure services and hardware that can be hosted on-premise. That is why hybrid cloud strategy is such a big differentiator with Microsoft because we do not force the customer to come on to the cloud but we ask them and partner with them on how they want to build their journey to the Cloud,” describes Sodhi. 

Roadmap for Enterprise and Government segment
Sodhi concludes the conversation by discussing the roadmap to address the target verticals, “When we think of any vertical, all of these customers are on the path of digital transformation. What customers are doing is, they are looking at all the data they have, how they can actually process that data and generate intelligence out of it. A variety of technologies come into play - sometimes it could be just taking the data that they have, applying machine learning on top of it and generating insights. At times it is how do I get more data, or how to do something more efficiently on cloud so there is cloud migration. I do not think there is just one kind of path for every kind of customer. But it is important that whichever path the customer is choosing, they can do it in their own data center or with a hoster or on ‘Azure stack’. We make sure that there is a strong partner ecosystem supporting each of these scenarios so that our customer has a choice. We provide the choice on the clouds to every customer of ours.”    

Business and government organizations are increasingly looking to transform their operations digitally, to drive efficiency in operations, empower employees, engage better with customers and transform their products and services. And Microsoft’s OCP organization is enabling it to work closely with its partners to enable organizations to digitally transform themselves.